Steven Hill

On his book Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age

Cover Interview of March 31, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Europe is the new world, not the old.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“Because modern-day Europe is so new and still in formation, journalists can’t figure out if Europe is a single nation or a confederacy of individual nations.”

On the second:

“Europe is now the world’s largest trading bloc, producing nearly a third of the world’s economy, almost as large as the U.S. and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China together, and more small businesses creating two thirds of the jobs in Europe, compared to only half the jobs in the U.S. Europe is the largest trading partner with both the U.S. and China, and had a higher per capita annual growth rate than the U.S. from 1998-2008.”

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016